Separatist Cadre Hopes for a Reprise in Ukraine

Vladimir Antyufeyev in his office in eastern Ukraine. Last week he was declared the acting prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

August 3, 2014

DONETSK, Ukraine — Early in the separatist struggle for eastern Ukraine, a leading Russian nationalist, Aleksandr G. Dugin, painted a glowing portrait of what the newly captured territories, referred to in Russia as Novorossiya, would become.

The land will be “a holy place for a renaissance of Russian culture, Russian spirit and Russian identity,” he told followers in Moscow. The residents will be “absolutely different people — brave, clever and able to fight for their freedom.”

Today, that dream seems distant, as the Ukrainian Army closes in on Donetsk, the separatist capital, having claimed on Saturday to surround the city. Shelling by Ukrainian troops killed six people in Donetsk over the weekend and set fires in outlying districts, while the forces probed the city’s outer defenses. Shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets all but deserted. Yet the pro-Russia leadership is pressing ahead with a sweeping goal of establishing a lasting government here.

For that, they have turned to a cadre of bureaucrats who have made their way into Donetsk from Transnistria, a breakaway territory of Moldova that is another unrecognized, pro-Russia region. They are led by Vladimir Antyufeyev, who was a longtime security chief there, and who in July was appointed deputy prime minister of the main rebel group here, the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Until 2012, Mr. Antyufeyev led a security force in Transnistria called the M.G.B., which Western diplomats say was modeled on the K.G.B., the Soviet secret police agency. The force he is forming in Donetsk bears this name as well, which means the Ministry of State Security.

“It’s a clear sign of support for the insurgency in eastern Ukraine from at least certain circles in Moscow,” said William H. Hill, former head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe mission in Moldova, who knew Mr. Antyufeyev. “It was extremely interesting to see that Moscow has fielded him again.”

Mr. Antyufeyev, 63, said that he came as a private citizen and a “professional” in establishing both ordinary and secret police forces.

“I revive the law enforcement organs, the groups that maintain social order, the Ministry of Interior Affairs and the state security,” he said, forming the bedrock of a new government.

“The people have a right to live on their land, to speak the language they want,” he said. “Only a state can defend that right. We are building a government formed by the will of the people.”

Mr. Antyufeyev and assistants form a civil corollary to the military aid that Western governments say is flowing to the separatists from Russia.

Mr. Antyufeyev replaced a Donetsk native as domestic security chief last month in a shake-up that the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, said strengthened Russia’s direct control of the movement just a week before Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down, a fact likely to be contemplated in any future lawsuits over the downing that name the Russian government.

The United States and European governments accuse Russia of continuing to aid the separatists militarily even after the downing of the plane, which killed all 298 people on board. Russia and the insurgents deny this.

Some, but not all, of the roughly 40 former Transnistria officials have arrived already, Mr. Antyufeyev said in an interview on Thursday in his office in the People’s Republic headquarters, where a portrait of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, gazed down. Other experts are on their way.

The Russian government, he said, has no hand in this staffing, and he denied ever being a member of the Soviet or Russian intelligence forces. It is “absurd,” he said, to assert that Russia has “direct manual control” of the Ukrainian separatist leadership.

Mr. Antyufeyev lived for a decade in Transnistria under the assumed name Vadim Shvetsov, to avoid an Interpol arrest warrant for murder for his role in suppressing pro-independence demonstrations in Latvia in 1991. The statute of limitations on that warrant has expired.

To avoid arrest, Mr. Antyufeyev and several dozen other Soviet police officials from the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia traveled to Transnistria and played a pivotal role in establishing the separatist state there.

Valery Litskai, a former foreign minister of the unrecognized Transnistria government, knew Mr. Antyufeyev when he established the M.G.B.

“He created very tight cooperation between the Russian F.S.B. and our M.G.B.,” Mr. Litskai said. “The system was very well organized, far better than in Abkhazia and Ossetia,” where Mr. Antyufeyev also consulted on forming security forces. In Transnistria, Mr. Litskai said, “He coordinated his work 90 percent with Moscow, and he never disguised it.”

Mr. Hill, the former O.S.C.E. chief, said Mr. Antyufeyev regularly met with the head of the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the K.G.B., when in Transnistria. “People would claim to me that he was a line officer of the F.S.B.,” Mr. Hill said, though his Soviet-era police work was in the riot police force. Mr. Hill said Mr. Antyufeyev was also active in an arms-smuggling network linked to the Milosevics, Yugoslavia’s former first family.

Mr. Antyufeyev described his career in former Soviet hot spots as defending the rights of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians. Muddying a picture of clear Russian government support, in the 1990s he was arrested in Moscow on the Latvian warrant, though later released. Long before the ouster in February of Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, which touched off the current crisis, Mr. Antyufeyev wrote a doctoral dissertation in 2003 that asserted the Russian government should support Russian-speaking groups in newly independent nations to retain its influence.

“If you push any living thing into a corner, even a little kitten, it will fight, and this is happening now to the Russians,” Mr. Antyufeyev said in the interview. “For 20 years the West, and most of all the United States, while pretending to befriend Russia, did everything to keep it weak. Russia is being pushed into a corner.”

Mr. Antyufeyev’s prominence here was underscored last week when he was declared acting prime minister of his group, while its prime minister, a fellow Russian, Alexander Borodai, was away in Russia. The rebel military commander, Igor Girkin, known as Igor Strelkov, has said he served in the F.S.B. until last year.

Oleg Tsarev, a native Ukrainian, leads an umbrella legislature that aims to unite the two separatist regions, Luhansk and Donetsk, into a state called Novorossiya. Underpinning its legal scaffolding, it now has a draft constitution written, he said, by lawyers in Moscow who are not in the Russian government.

The Transnistria bureaucrats, he said, were needed because the revolution “formed chaotically, and many good people made decisions on their own, so we needed to bring order.”

Aleksandr A. Karaman, a a former vice president of Transnistria who joined Mr. Antyufeyev in Donetsk, said in an interview that formation of a bureaucracy and state security police force proved critical in the early years of the separatist region in Moldova, and that the experience of the architects of this effort is invaluable now in Ukraine.

“The problems here and in Transnistria are one and the same, only we went through them earlier, and the Donetsk People’s Republic is going through them now,” he said. “The problem is building a state.”

Mr. Antyufeyev said he was an expert in just this. “All empires fall,” he said. “Then, you will need us. We are helpers. We are the professionals. You cannot blame us, as you cannot blame a doctor for the patient he treats. Only we are not doctors, but lawyers and political scientists.”